Monday, January 25, 2016

The Purifying Knife: The Strange Career of Eugenics in Texas, 1850-1940

Women in the gallery of the Texas
House of Representatives cheered on the afternoon of March 2, 1923, after Rep.
Edith Wilmans of Dallas delivered a fiery defense of a eugenics bill she had
sponsored.The legislation, House Bill
85, required all couples applying for a marriage license in Texas to undergo a
physical examination and receive “a certificate from a reputable physician”
confirming the couple’s physical fitness. Getting married depended on passing
the exam.

Another member of the House asked Wilmans about the fairness of the
financial burden the examinations entailed.According to The Dallas Morning
News, “[t]here was applause . ..
when Mrs. Wilmans replied . . . it would be far better for a couple
contemplating marriage to spend $15 for such examinations than $15 later for a coffin
for a child born insufficiently nourished.”[i]

Neither the Morning News nor
the Journal of the House of
Representatives provided a full transcript of the debate.However, based on the Morning News’ brief report, Wilmans implied that requiring physical
examinations might prevent the union of poor couples that would produce
children they could not adequately feed.However, her comments also suggested that the required medical exam
might reduce marriages among the poor because many in the lower classes were
physically and mentally “unfit” and couldn’t pass such medical scrutiny. Such a legal barrier to marriage might,
therefore, reduce the births of what eugenicists called the “dysgenic” –- the
biologically inferior.

Wilmans in 1922 had become the first woman ever elected to the Texas
state Legislature.[ii]
She failed to win the endorsement of the anti-Ku Klux Klan Dallas County
Citizens’ League when she ran for the state House that year because she refused
to renounce the so-called “Invisible Empire.”[iii]She won in spite of the city’s traditional
elites and it was extraordinary for a House freshman to introduce a proposed
law that received so much attention. House Bill 85 received a favorable report
from the Public Health Committee.[iv]Wilmans and her allies defeated an
amendment by Charles Rice of Houston County.Rice wanted only men to undergo examinations and the tests used merely
to detect venereal disease. Wilmans argued such a change would probably render
the bill unconstitutional and that the “things which the bills seeks to guard
against” were not just sexually transmitted diseases and were not “limited to
one sex.” [v]Wilmans’ efforts proved to be for naught,
the bill ultimately failing on a second reading by a vote of 66-51. (In Texas,
bills in the House and Senate go through three separate “readings,” with
majorities required to approve the legislation in both chambers of the
legislature on the second and third reading before the bill can be forwarded to
the governor for signature or a veto).[vi]This failure was a common experience for Texas
advocates of eugenics, a scientific enterprise
conducted largely in Britain and the United States (but later most famously in
Nazi Germany) that aimed to breed biologically superior humans and eliminate inferior
strains.[vii]

Eugenicists embraced a
lengthy agenda.For instance, eugenics
supporters in the state, like the geneticist and one-time University of Texas
professor Hermann Joseph Muller, sought to encourage reproduction among the
biologically fit, to allow humanity to “take control of its own evolution and
produce future generations that were wiser, brighter, more talented, and
healthier in mind and body . . .”[viii]Some eugenicistsalso opposed the immigration into the United
States of those they deemed racially undesirable: East Asians, Eastern and
Southern Europeans, Africans and Latin Americans.In a December 1922 speech to the
Dallas Critic Club (an influential civic organization), a eugenicist attorney
in that city, Lewis Meriwether Dabney, declared that he wanted to end
“promiscuous immigration” by "mongrelized Asiatics, Greeks, Levantines,
Southern Italians, and sweepings of the Balkans, of Poland and of Russia."[ix]

Finally, eugenicists lobbied
for compulsory sterilization laws, which allowed judges or boards to order those
deemed unfit (overwhelmingly the physically and mentally disabled, as well as men,
women, and even children, of color, and the poor) to undergo vasectomies, tubal
ligations, and other surgical procedures to prevent the victims from reproducing.In states other than Texas, eugenicists
successfully lobbied legislatures to pass sterilization bills in the American
Northeast, across the Upper and Deep South, in much of the Midwest, the Plains
States, and the Pacific Coast.One author,
Edwin Black, estimates that nationwide about 70,000 Americans underwent
involuntary sterilizations from 1900 to 1970, with women constituting most of
the victims.Yet, by 1936, Texas was one
of only 16 states that never implemented a law allowing for the sterilization
of the unfit.[x]

That Texas never passed
a sterilization law represents a mystery, given that the movement in the Lone
Star State predated the coining of the term “eugenics,” the presence of
internationally prominent eugenicists like Muller there, and a prevailing state
culture shaped by the classism, racism, and xenophobia shared by most (but not
all) eugenicists.The absence of a
sterilization law wasn’t due to a lack of effort by the Lone Star State’s eugenics
movement.The state Legislature mulled numerous
eugenics bills in the early twentieth century, with each going down in defeat. Because
of its failures, the eugenics movement in Texas has received little attention from
scholars, referred to only in passing in most histories of eugenics.[xi] Texas eugenicists’ inability to shape public policy has perhaps led historians
to mistakenly conclude that the movement was not vibrant in the state and to
therefore ignore the prevalence of eugenics thought and activism south of the
Red River.Eugenics, in fact, has a long
history in Texas, was embraced by many prominent figures from the Panhandle to
the Gulf Coast, and deeply influenced the state’s popular culture.Nevertheless, when it came to legislation,
advocates came away empty-handed. It is perhaps easier for an historian to
explain why something happened rather than theorizing why something did
not.Some explanations for this failure
rest on speculation rather than archival resources.But clues exist and it appears that Texas
eugenicists hit a brick wall legislatively for several reasons, including the
political and theological leanings of important eugenicists, the association of
eugenics with Darwinism (unpopular in a deeply religious state), and the
concerns of important cotton growers, who exploited Mexican farm labor, that
eugenicists would shut off Mexican immigration.

Almost three decades before the English biologist Sir
Francis Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883,[xii]
a Texas doctor, Gideon Lincecum, lobbied for a law allowing the state to order
castration – the application of what he called “the knife of purification”
-to be imposed on criminals and others
he deemed unfit, to prevent the transmission of defective biological
characteristics to future generations.[xiii]The Georgia-born Lincecum (1793-1874) argued after
he moved to Texas in 1848 that criminality and work habits were inborn human
traits.[xiv]
The eugenics movement later echoed this biological determinism.Also, like the eugenicists of the coming
decades, Lincecum feared that the unfit would soon reproductively run over the
biologically superior.He thought it
might take thousands of years to produce a biological paradise, but Lincecum
still dreamed of“a perfect world
inhabited by a physically superb race of men and women, morally and
intellectually perfect, who selectively reproduced for even higher attainment,”
as Lincecum biographer Lois Wood Burkhalter put it. Lincecum saw castration of
the unfit as the fastest path towards that dreamland.[xv]

Lincecum was not just a theorist, but had applied the purifying knife
himself to someone he deemed a threat to the species-- without the patient’s
consent.[xvi]
“Did you ever see a eunuch?” he asked his New York friend Dr. R.P.
Hallock.“I have been familiarly
acquainted with five of them.One of
them I made myself.

He was a degraded drunken sot – in delirium tremens at the time and I did it in a kind of youthful
frolic.It cured him, however, and made
an honest man of him and he often thanked me for it . . . He became quite
industrious, religious, and studious . . . I have had this subject under close
toiling investigation during the last ten years. [xvii]

In the 1850s, Lincecum sent a “Memorial,” as
he called a proposed law he authored, to 676 legislators, newspaper editors,
doctors and other Texas notables. In this Memorial, he fiercely advocated
forced castration of criminals as a means of improving the species.[xviii]He saw castration as a means of holding in
check or even curing what he considered the innate animal nature of
criminals.Lincecum tirelessly proposed
eugenic castration for two decades, from his first call in the early 1850s
until his death in 1874. He reacted with fury when his proposal for castration
of criminals met with ridicule, indifference, or fierce opposition.Only two newspapers in Texas, he complained
in an 1859 letter, the Colorado Democrat
and the Ranger, published his
“Memorial” in full, and most others referred to it only briefly “for the fun of
the thing than any other consideration.”[xix]

Lincecum was unable to creative a mass movement
behind his favorite cause. Benjamin E. Tarver and
John Sayles, who represented Lincecum’s Washington County, introduced the
“Lincecum Law” in the Texas House on November 16, 1853, but the proposal met
only with derision.“They did it in a
manner better calculated to excite ridicule and opposition than a philosophical
consideration of the matter,” Lincecum later bitterly complained.[xx]

Bristling at critics who charged that
mandatory castration of criminals was a violation of human rights, Lincecum
informed a correspondent that castration would provide a more humane alternative
to executions and would prevent the conception of future criminals.“The only available remedy is the
knife,” he wrote. “Its power to deter and to save the wicked is indisputably
efficient . . . [A]s to the ‘inhumanity,’ and ‘cruelty’ of the proposed changes
in our penal code, when compared with the rope, penitentiary, and the
branding iron, it is an objection that will never be brought forward by
intelligent men . . . ”[xxi]The legislature
rejected the“Lincecum Law” in both 1855
and 1856.[xxii]

Similar voices to Lincecum’s would be heard in Texas before the turn of
the century.Dr.
F.E. Daniel, publisher of one of the state’s first medical journals, in a
paper before the International Medico-Legal Congress in Chicago in August 1893 called
for castration and other forced sterilization measures
as a final solution to deviancy in the human population.[xxiii]Daniel subsequently published his
paper under the title “Should Insane Criminals, Or Sexual Perverts, Be Allowed
to Procreate?”, which appeared later that same year in the Medico-Legal Journal.[xxiv]Daniel admitted that science had not firmly established the root causes of
alcoholism, homosexuality, or other behaviors he disdained, but he entertained
no doubts that heredity and not a person’s social environment, shaped a person’s
behavior.

“No fact is better established that drunkenness, insanity, and criminal
traits of behavior, as well as syphilis, consumption, and scrofula may descend
from parent to child,” he said. Daniel then mourned that states had failed to take
more aggressive action “in the way of rational prophylaxis against a long list
of maladies that destroy both mind and body.”[xxv]He protested that, “In no state are such
restrictions put upon the privilege of marriage as are calculated to arrest the
propagation of consumption, syphilis, insanity, drunkenness, and criminal
propensity; nor is any other method resorted to, calculated to counteract, or
lessen the degrading effects of hereditary transmission of these vices.”[xxvi]

Daniel warned that the many drunks, criminals and lower races who lived
in Texas would proliferate wildly in the coming years and overwhelm the state’s
fit population unless dramatic measures were taken.“[W]ith the lower classes, particularly
negroes, it is known that illicit intercourse is common,” he said.[xxvii]In spite of his persistence, however (like
Lincecum) Daniel proved unable to translate his ideas into state action.

Texas
eugenicists got further in the 20th century than they had the
previous five decades, but even as other states passed sterilization laws
across the country, similar efforts continued to meet frustrations in the Lone
State State.In
May 1913, the Lancet-Clinic medical
journal chided the Texas Senate for voting down a measure that spring calling
for the “sterilization of defectives” by a margin of 14-11.“We ought not to expect too much from our
legislatures as at present constituted, but it would seem to be a reasonable
proposition that they allow themselves to be guided by expert opinion in
technical matters,” complained the Cincinnati-based publication.

. . . The reasons advanced by some of the opponents of the bill
are so utterly childish as to arouse our pity for the people of Texas, whose
destinies are in the keeping of such profound ignorance.One senator declared that the proposed
vasectomy was a “cruel and unusual punishment” and therefore unconstitutional.The man must have been a lawyer – and one
unacquainted with the statutes of other States in the Union . . . One senator “named
[H.P.] Brelsford [a Democrat from Eastland], with a voice like a megaphone,
made the hall resound with pleas – almost tearful – for the God-given right of
procreation,” and another one “drew a pathetic picture of a young couple who
had built a nest and looked forward to the laugh of many children, and pictured
their sadness and sorrow and disappointment because some board had sterilized
hubby.”[xxviii]

TheClinic-Lancet mocked the compassion of
the senator for the theoretical husband, noting that “the hypothetical hubby
was in no danger, because the bill . . . ‘confined the operation to the inmates
of charity institutions and prisons – the wreckage of humanity – to those whose
lives had been wrecked by their ancestors.” The Clinic-Lancet then approvingly quoted an editorial in the Texas Medical Journal, which declared
“the necessity of some effort to arrest this deluge of idiots, imbeciles,
lunatics, epileptics and hereditary and confirmed criminals.”[xxix]

Eugenics became a
concern not just of a small medical clique. Some of the most powerful politicians
in Texas sounded a grim eugenicist warning. In a speech in the Texas Panhandle in April
1922, Gov. Pat Neff warned that the state faced a crisis as there were “over 6,000
insane in the institutions of Texas . . . We are just breeding lunatics in
Texas and it must be stopped.”[xxx]In spite of Neff’s bully pulpit, his plea
fell on deaf ears. Ridicule from medical journals aside, legislative opponents
of eugenics in the coming years held the day in Texas.A decade after the Texas Senate rejected the
1913 sterilization bill, the Texas House also turned down Wilmans’ plan.

There would be at least
three other major pushes for eugenics legislation in Texas in the first four
decades of the 20th century.The
state House passed a sterilization bill in 1932, but the law died in the Senate.[xxxi]
In 1935, Senator Arthur Duggan of Littlefield, northwest of Lubbock, filed yet
one more doomed sterilization bill, one that colleagues J. Franklin Spears of
San Antonio and Clarence Farmer of Fort Worth denounced as “vicious.”[xxxii]
Duggan believed that the supposedly rapid reproduction of the unfit constituted
a state emergency and urged swift action in his legislation. “The fact that there
are now no adequate laws for sterilization of inmates in state institutions and
the further fact that human experience has demonstrated that heredity plays an
important part in the transmission of idiocy, feeble-mindedness, insanity,
epilepsy, and other degeneracies and that the state of Texas has in its
custodial care. . . many mentally
defective persons who if now discharged or paroled probably would become . . .
a menace to society but who, if incapable of procreating might safely be
discharged or paroled and become self-supporting . . . creates an emergency.”[xxxiii]

Duggan’s bill would
have created a State Board of Eugenics made up of the Texas State Health
Officer, the chief physician and surgeon of the University of Texas at the
Galveston Medical College, and a member of the state Board of Control.(In 1920, Texas established the Board of Control
to oversee all “eleemosynary” – charitable – institutions housing dependent
populations.)The eugenics board would have
considered recommendations by the administrators of state homes and hospitals
and made judgments regarding sterilizations of patients and inmates who “would
produce children with tendencies towards serious physical, mental, or nervous
diseases or deficiencies.”The records on
such hearings would have been closed to the public.Notices of recommended sterilizations would
have been forwarded to spouses, the nearest living relative, or legal
representatives, with the patient given ten days to appeal the eugenics board’s
decisions to a district court. If the judge concurred with the board, the
sterilization would follow.[xxxiv]

The Dallas Morning News heartily supported
Duggan’s legislation – Senate Bill 59 - and ran a patronizing editorial about
its critics. “Sterilization makes its way slowly, yet a misguided sense of
humanity opposes it,” said an editorial endorsing the law published on January
18, 1935.“It is far kinder to prevent
the birth of persons doomed to become public charges or to drift early to crime
or institutional care than to permit their introduction into the world.”[xxxv]
The Morning News predicted that
Duggan’s bill, and a rival sterilization bill proposed that session by Sen. Pat
Jefferson of San Antonio, would face intense opposition as both senators
struggled for space on a crowded legislative calendar. Alonzo Wasson of the Morning News, characterized the bill’s opponents as being in part motivated
by constitutional concerns regarding the right of states to force
sterilizations on criminals and the insane.Wasson believed those concerns had been “largely dissolved” because of
the 1927 United States Supreme Court Buck v. Bell decision that upheld a
Virginia sterilization law.Other
opponents of the Duggan bill, Wasson said, believed the legislation violated
their religious beliefs. “The arguments left to those opposed to sterilization,”
Wasson wrote, “are not much more than comes from sentimentalism and certain
religious concepts which antedate even the notion that insanity and other
mental ills were penalties visited upon the wicked by a wrathful Providence.”[xxxvi]

Senate Bill 59 was
referred to the Committee on Public Health. Opposition was intense as Wasson predicted: enough
to kill both Duggan’s and Jefferson’s sterilization bills.Duggan’s bill was reported out of the
committee and forwarded to the full Senate along with a minority report urging
the upper chamber to reject the law.The
bill lacked sufficient support in the full chamber to ever come up for a vote.[xxxvii]Any momentum behind introducing a new
sterilization measure suffered a serious blow on September 6, 1935 when the
chief legislative champion of that cause, Duggan, died of heart failure.[xxxviii]

Upon Duggan’s death,
efforts to implement a Texas eugenics law two years later fell to the state
House.Four representatives – Conde
Hoskins of Gonzales in Central Texas, Minet Davis of Kirbyville in Southeast
Texas, C.L. Stocks of Gainesville, in North Central Texas, and John Dollins of
Waco – backed a new sterilization measure in the lower chamber in the 1937
regular session.[xxxix]House Bill 555 received an 8-4 favorable
report from the Public Health Committee, after provisions allowing the forced
sterilization of habitual criminals and “degenerates” were deleted, leaving
“incurable insane people” as the only potential target.[xl]
Once again, there were critics.One Dallas Morning News reader worried that the
sterilization bill, if passed, would become a slippery slope leading eventually
to the euthanizing of the elderly.Simultaneously alluding to President Franklin Roosevelt’s so-called
“court-packing scheme” which would have allowed him to select an additional
Supreme Court justice for every sitting justice more than 70 years old on the court,
the Texas sterilization bill, and euthanasia policies in Nazi Germany, Mrs.
Cecil Smith of Sherman in East Texas worried in a letter to the editor that,
“If today, seventy years be the Supreme Court limit, tomorrow it may be the
life limit. What with euthanasia for the suffering, sterilization for the
unfit, and King Herod for the unborn and for the senile . . . it behooves us elderly to walk warily.”[xli]Smith need not have worried because the
latest eugenicist effort in the Texas state Legislature failed yet again.

Regardless of their lack of legislative success, Texas eugenicists
deeply influenced the state’s politics and culture throughout the first three
decades of the 20th century.Political
leaders who endorsed eugenicist ideas included not only Neff, governor from
1921-1925, but also Congressman John Box of Jacksonville, Texas, who served on
the United States House Immigration Committee and warned of the danger “non-white”
immigration, particularly from Mexico and Asia, posed for the future of the
United States. “Every Chinaman or ‘mixed breed’ born to these seasonal laborers
[in agriculture] under the flag of the United States is, by the provisions of
the Constitution, a citizen entitled to go from one part of the nation to
another freely and to remain, and have his children remain, forever,” Box
declared in a June 5, 1927 statement approvingly quoted in the Eugenical News published in Cold Spring
Harbor, New York.[xlii]

Eugenicist goals overlapped significantly with and reinforced the anti-immigration
agenda of the Ku Klux Klan, one of the most powerful institutions in Texas in
the early 1920s.[xliii]Politically influential newspapers like
the Dallas Morning News supported
eugenics.“Quality not quantity should
be the goal of science in seeking to improve our race,” the Morning News declared in an editorial on
August 25, 1932.“ . . . . Racial
poisons, feeble-mindedness, mental diseases, and ignorance are the four great
curses that Western civilization, in the long run, must conquer, if it is to
survive.”[xliv]Eugenicists not only held state office and
published newspapers, but they also ran institutions of higher education. One
of the loudest eugenicists, Edward Everett Davis, who from 1925-1946 served as
dean of North Texas Agricultural College (now the University of Texas at
Arlington), authored a pro-eugenics novel in 1940 titled The White Scourge, and once complained that, “All that has been
said about the Negro regarding his low economic productivity, poor standards of
living, and large families . . . apply with equal validity to the
Mexicans.”Davis befriended Congressman
Box and urged him to read one of the most important pro-eugenics works in the
early twentieth century, Lothrop Stoddard’s The
Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1920).Davis wanted Box to understand the importance
of keeping “lower races” out of the country because of the danger they posed
and because of what he claimed was their tendency to intermarry with “marginal”
whites who, he said, possessed “just enough intelligence to beget children, hew
wood, draw water, and pick cotton.”[xlv]

The City of Dallas
named Dr. J.W. Bass, who once authored a paper on “Variation, Heredity, and
Eugenics,” as its acting director of health in 1927.[xlvi]Eugenicists found a platform at the Texas
Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Texas A&M University), Baylor
Medical University, the Dallas Child Guidance Clinic, the Texas State Board of
Health, the Dallas Dental Association, the Dallas Association of Visiting
Nurses, the Texas State Parent-Teachers Association, and the Dallas Council of
Mothers.The Dallas YMCA and Y.W.C.A. helped
organize public eugenics exhibits and in other ways spread the movement’s
gospel.[xlvii]Through the Dallas YMCA, more than “4,000
young people . . . heard” Dr. Winfield Scott’s “ . . . talks on health and
eugenics at seventeen district meetings.”[xlviii]

Influential figures in Texas made a fierce
effort to spread the eugenics gospel throughout the state.For many years in the early twentieth
century, a "Better Baby Contest" proved a crowd-pleasing event at the
Texas State Fair in Dallas.In 1914, a
committee of doctors measured the skulls and other traits of the 500 entrants,
with $15 awarded to the parents of the biologically "best" child, any
class, and $5 for the best twins and triplets.[xlix]
Winners were white, blonde and the scions of elite families.Hoping to evangelize the Dallas crowds to the
gospel of better breeding, A. Caswell Ellis, an educational psychologist at the
University of Texas (later a national leader in the eugenic movement),
flattered the crowd attending a Better Baby Contest at the State Fair in 1914,
declaring, "Texas babies are better babies than the babies of any other
state." Long a popularizer of science[l],
Ellis took the opportunity to evangelize for his favorite cause and
"lightly touched on eugenics" for his Dallas audience.[li]Eugenicists also established
a “Fitter Families Council” in Dallas in November 1927.[lii]

Roy Bedichek, the chief of the state’s Interscholastic League Bureau,
added his voice to the state’s large pro-eugenics chorus. He publicly mourned
the negative eugenic effect of World War I, which slaughtered “the flower of
English manhood” and impoverished “German blood.” Bedichek promoted sports as a
way to divert energy away from such biologically destructive pursuits as combat.[liii]

Meanwhile, Carrie Weaver Smith used her position as the controversial
first director of the Gainesville State School for Girls, in part, as a
platform for promoting eugenics. Established by Texas in 1916, the school sat
on 160 rural acres, administrators pursuing a mission of providing “a home for
delinquent and dependent girls where they [might] be trained to those useful arts
and sciences to which women are adapted” and to encourage within inmates a
respect for “the sacredness of the responsibility of parenthood and wifehood.”
According to historian William S. Bush, by 1920, a large majority of the
school’s girls came from cities, half of those from the nearby Dallas-Fort
Worth area.The Gainesville school
subjected new arrivals to close physical examinations and found that half of
the juvenile offenders suffered from venereal disease.A progressive like Wilmans, the Georgia-born
Smith had graduated from the Pennsylvania Women’s Medical College in 1910, and
at Gainesville she ran a program that one social work publication, The Survey, described as “where girls go
right.” The Gainesville School housed a tough crowd – teenagers Smith described
as “the children of squatters” who came from “shotgun houses” and “covered
wagons,” the “moral and physical filth of their surroundings being
unspeakable.” The girls were frequently victims of sexual abuse, often at the
hands of male relatives, and they had grown up in households characterized by
substance abuse.Smith often told
audiences about one girl who told her that at home she was used to “having half
a pint of whiskey and two packages of ‘Camels’ a day.” Many never had a room to
themselves until the courts dispatched them to Gainesville. [liv]

Smith’s rehabilitation methods were in sharp contrast to prevailing
norms at Texas state schools. Before the Gainesville School had been completed,
Smith prepared for running the institution by inspecting the Dallas County
Industrial Girls Home.She found, to her
horror, that the girls there suffered from hookworm due to the tainted meat fed
them and discovered that the children had even been disciplined with chains and
whips. At Gainesville, Smith prohibited corporal punishment.She sought to introduce the inmates to a more
serene, normal life.Classes taught
girls stenography, bookkeeping, and other stereotypically “feminine” skills.
She established a museum on the grounds where inmates could leave flowers and
other natural specimens they encountered on walks. If other state schools emphasized criminal
corrections, Smith’s school “began with the assumption that its charges were
children and adolescents who could be rehabilitated,” as Bush noted.“The emphasis on privacy, adult mentoring, education,
and adult development distinguished Gainesville’s programs as one devoted to
juvenile development.” Smith spent more money on her young charges than other state
school directors and also provided her girls sex education, two issues which
provoked the ire of the state Legislature, which fired her in 1925.[lv]

Like many eugenicists in Texas,
however, Smith held contradictory beliefs regarding the role of nature vs.
nurture in shaping individual destinies.As she pursued rehabilitation of the Gainesville school’s girls, she
also often spoke and wrote like a strict biological determinist and sought to
reduce the reproduction of the unfit. In her presentation “The Unadjusted
Girl,” delivered at the National Conference of Social Work in Chicago in 1920,
Weaver noted that the girls at her institution often arrived poorly-nourished,
poorly educated, abused, and damaged by years of poverty.Yet, she also blamed their criminality on
their biology.“Eugenically, the
delinquent girl is a terrible misfit, and reflects the folly and criminal
negligence of the state in regard to marriage regulations,” Smith said.
“Idiots, epileptics, syphilitics, tuberculars, marry ad libitum.We dare not interfere with their personal
liberty, we much prefer to take care of their offspring in the penitentiaries,
asylums, schools for the feebleminded, and finally thrust some of them into
oblivion by the hangman’s noose or the electric chair.At the Texas Training School our chief
difficulties in discipline have been with girls whose heredity must have
rendered them psychopathic.”In her
talk, Smith then thanked one of the chief leaders of the eugenics movement in
the United States, Charles Davenport of the Eugenics Records Office in Cold
Spring Harbor, New York, for providing the Gainesville School a “eugenics field
worker.” Cornelia Augenstein of Kent,
Ohio, was assigned to Gainesville in 1919, the first such worker ever assigned
to Texas by the ERO.Eugenics field
workers investigated the family backgrounds of delinquents and others suspected
of being dysgenic and then would “collect, sort, and analyze valuable mental and
psychological data,” according to author Michael A. Rembis.[lvi]

Smith believed that racial identity played a role in delinquency and that
Native American heritage in particular contributed to criminal behavior. “At
the Texas Training School for Girls, our greatest problems are the girls who
have one eighth and one sixteenth American Indian blood,” she said.“These girls show the racial facial types and
marked physical strength, are mentally exceptionally bright, and have varied
interests. They are inclined to be physically unclean, frequently objecting to
the routine of daily bathing.Morally,
they are indiscriminating and sensual to a morbid degree, seeking indulgence
with either sex. They are ego-centric, selfish, resentful of authority, but
generally [have] . . . considerable
personal magnetism.It seems to me that
these individuals might be a subject for special research and that the results
might indicate the necessity of regulating marriage with Indians.”[lvii]

Smith would prove controversial and may have, in the long term, damaged
the movement.But the eugenicists’ stature
in Texas certainly should have been enhanced in the state by the support of two
of the world’s most prominent scientists, Julian Huxley (who from 1913-1916
helped establish the biology department at the Rice Institute – now called Rice
University), and a Huxley acolyte, geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller (who later
taught at the University of Texas). Huxley came from a British family of
brilliant scientists and accomplished authors, including his brother Aldous Huxley
who achieved renown with his dystopian science fiction classic Brave New World.Huxley’s grandfather, T.H. Huxley, won
fame as a biologist and became one of the most well-known defenders of Charles
Darwin’s theory of evolution.The
Huxleys, however, through several generations, also battled severe depression
and periodic mental breakdowns, and Julian was no exception. While in Texas, he
researched genetics with Muller, and studied “ritualized behavior” in birds, as
well as doing work on egrets and fiddler crabs. His lab work aside, Julian’s chief
role, however, became that of a science “popularizer,” as he reached a wide
audience in an astonishingly prolific career as a writer of not just scientific
journal articles, but books and newspaper and magazine articles.[lviii]

The Rice Institute in Houston traced it origins to William Marsh Rice,
murdered in 1900, whose bitterly contested will provided the funds for the
establishment of an institution of higher learning for white students
only.“There are no colored
students allowed,” mathematics professor Griffith C. Evans wrote to Huxley in
1913 before the biologist arrived in the city. “If there were, we should have
no white ones.”[lix] Racism
enveloped the establishment of Rice and in this way, the scientist fit right in.“[T]he negro mind is as different from the
white mind as the negro from the white body,” he claimed in an article he
authored, after he returned to his homeland, in a popular British magazine The Spectator.In this article, part of a series of his
observations on the American scene, Huxley drew on his encounters with African
Americans in Texas and across the rest of the country for the article, “America
Revisited: The Negro Problem.” Huxley
portrayed African Americans as mentally arrested in a childlike state, in a
passage remarkable for its catalog of sweeping stereotypes:

The old characterization " the minds of children
" is perfectly true. The typical negro servant, for instance, is wonderful
with children for the reason that she really enjoys doing the things that
children do.She is grown up and strong
and can look after them: but she enjoys the sort of story that you find in
children's books, likes to talk and play around in the way that children do.
The race has the child's love of bright colours: a negro buck with Reckitt's
blue trousers, Colman's mustard shirt, ox-blood tan shoes, and a face like a
polished grate is a grand sight![lx]

In his article, Huxley suggested
that perhaps black historical experiences such as “[s]lavery: freedom and
carpetbagging followed by Jim-Crow-ism and the turning of freedom and equality
into empty names: discontent and friction: [and] lynchings” might account for
what he characterized as infantilism among African Americans, but in the
article he gave far more weight to supposed biological differences, perceived
variations that clearly discomforted the English gentleman.“You have only to go to a nigger camp-meeting
to see the African mind in operation—the shrieks, the dancing and yelling and
sweating, the surrender to the most violent emotion, the ecstatic blending of
the soul of the Congo with the practice of the Salvation Army,” he wrote. “So
far, no very satisfactory psychological measure has been found for racial
differences: that will come, but meanwhile the differences are patent.”[lxi]

Although Huxley wrote the
article after his return to England, it’s reasonable to assume he held and
expressed similar views while in Houston. In “The Negro Problem,” Huxley
suggested that African Americans posed a eugenical threat to America’s
future.He noted the Great Migration
underway – a diaspora of six million or more Southern blacks to the Northern
states and the West, beginning just before World War I and continuing for
decades,[lxii]
a movement that alarmed him because it led to greater miscegenation (the sexual
coupling of blacks and whites) and a greater number of mixed-race children.
Huxley said that so-called race mixing did not “improve” African Americans but
only produced very unhappy, and possibly dangerous, offspring.“[T]here is the undoubted fact that by
putting some of the white man's mind into the mulatto you not only make him
more capable and more ambitious (there are no well-authenticated cases of pure
blacks rising to any eminence), but you increase his discontent and create an
obvious injustice if you continue to treat him like any full-blooded African,”
Huxley said. “The American negro is making trouble because of the American
white blood that is in him.”[lxiii]

The Great Migration had another
unfortunate consequence, Huxley believed.As African American sharecroppers and tenants escaped to the North, there
was “an attempt to fill the vacuum with another ‘inferior race’ —the Mexicans.”Mexican immigration had produced even more
mixed race children. As a eugenicist, Huxley wanted to prevent interracial
unions and to accomplish this, he wanted to shut the door to further Mexican
immigration. “There is no immigration quota for Mexicans any more than for
other peoples of the American continent,” he wrote. “But there are strict laws
as to the literacy and other qualifications of all immigrants, which would keep
out 95 per cent. of Mexican labourers. However, the frontier is immense and
human smuggling easy, and, legally or otherwise (usually otherwise), the
Mexicans continue to pour in.”[lxiv]As a solution to America’s biological peril,
Huxley proposed a more radical de jure
and de facto racial segregation than
already prevailed in the United States.After rejecting the deportation of all blacks to Africa as impractical, Huxley
said that the United States should allow no African Americans in the North or
at least make the region utterly unattractive to prospective black migrants by
allowing blacks “no privileges.” The South, he said, should be left
multi-racial.[lxv]

While in Texas, Huxley not only refined
his fears of African Americans and Mexicans. He also deepened his commitment to
negative eugenics – policies such as compulsory sterilization statutes - proclaiming
his support for suchlaws as essential
for human survival.Just four years
after he left Rice, Huxley proclaimed that negative eugenics, using compulsory
sterilization to eliminate the fertility of the unfit, represented the only
feasible method of preventing a human biological meltdown.“There are three possible ways in
which the level of the race can be raised,” he wrote in The Athenaeum.

The first is the
method of negative eugenics, which consists in preventing stocks which are
known to be bad in every way from reproducing themselves. The second consists
in encouraging the better stocks to greater multiplication, whether by appeals
to their patriotism or religion or by bonuses for children.The third is by raising the maximum level,
which could be done by consciously-directed matings.No sensible person imagines that this last
process could be attempted until we have vastly more knowledge than at present.
The second just looms on the horizon of practical politics; the first is
urgent.[lxvi]

After
settling back in England, Huxley would return to Rice on occasion to deliver
guest lectures and promote sterilization laws. In three such appearances in
1924, Huxley called for widely available birth control, which he called the
norm in human history. Birth control would prevent overpopulation, increases in
infant mortality, and an explosion in the number of defectives. “The regulation
of the numbers of population, in some form or the other, has been practiced by
the great majority of the human race . . . [E]very savage and primitive people
of which we have any knowledge, almost every people of the early civilizations,
and many people of the civilizations today, deliberately regulate their numbers
. . . Either infanticide, or abortion, or various restrictions upon or
regulations of marriage, have been practiced, with the effect of preventing or
slowing the natural increase of population.”[lxvii]Huxley argued to his audience at Rice that some
practiced birth control, but that, tragically, the wrong people embraced
contraception.“In all countries, the
birthrate of the upper classes – aristocracy, professional people, business
men, and trades people – is now much lower than that of the laboring classes,”
he said.[lxviii]

This danger was increasing, he said,
because improvements in medicine and public sanitation made it possible for
those individuals who would have died of disease and other hardships in an
earlier age to thrive. “There is a very real danger that the average
quality of the population may be changed for the worse by the survival of the
unfit -- a danger that is made more acute by the fact . . . that on the whole
the undesirables multiply faster than the desirables,” he said.“. . . Morons breed morons, and neurotics of
criminal tendencies bring others like themselves into the world; and we let
them do it. The situation is aggravated when we find that on the whole these
undesirable types have a higher fertility than the rest of the population, so
that their relative numbers are tending to increase.”[lxix]
The facts, as Huxley saw them, led him to fight for coercive “mating control,”
including compulsory sterilization.

When we
know that men or women are not only the embodiments but the bearers of
hereditary taint and defect, we have no more right to allow them to reproduce
than to allow a child with scarlet fever to be visited by all his
school-friends. We are told that this infringes the sacred rights of the
individual and prejudices the idea of personal liberty. Such utterances are but
another example of the unfortunate tendency, apparently inherent in the
primitive human mind, of demanding and pretending to find absolute sanctions
for ideas which are not in any sense absolute. If we talk of the divine and
inalienable right of personal liberty, we are talking bunkum . . .Everyone knows, directly, when they begin to
think about the matter, that what we call liberty is a compromise between the
claims of the individual and those of the community, a compromise between
abstract justice, selfish egotism, practical give-and-take, and social
expediency . . .We do not hesitate to
weed our gardens. For God’s sake, why do we hesitate to weed the garden of
humanity?[lxx]

Julian Huxley ended his guest lecture at
Rice by proposing his own brave new world in which sterilization might
eliminate defectives and in which the “germ plasm” of gifted women might be
fertilized and the fetus brought to full development in a laboratory.In essence, he envisioned what would later be
called “test tube babies.”[lxxi]He dreamed of the state no longer having to
rely on the random sexual attraction between the gifted. Super children could
be produced in a controlled number, factory-style. Huxley’s remarkable outline
of the eugenicist program continued with his call for countries to eliminate
“the problem of race” by aiming at “homogeneity.”Huxley said that the United States must
strictly limit immigration to only the best types to achieve this goal.Huxley concluded by expressing his doubts
whether democracy could provide the means towards the golden biological future
he sought.

I think
it would be well if we asked ourselves whether our present brand of democracy
is calculated to give us the best organs of social control and differentiation.

The
advantage of democracy is the raising of the condition of the mass of the
people to a good average. The curse is the tendency to pull down what is above
the average to the level of the average’s mediocrity.

A
democracy of material opportunity freely surrendering itself to the guidance of
an aristocracy of thought -- that seems to me to sum up pretty closely the
biological ideal for society.[lxxii]

Texas’ white majority had no problem with
the state’s racial dictatorship over African Americans and Latino/as, but such
an openly elitist call for even the white masses to submit to an “aristocracy
of thought” would be a political hard sell.Such political radicalism of the right and left is one likely reason for
the movement’s futility under the Capitol Dome. Because
of the Hitler regime, eugenics today is often stereotyped as a right-wing
campaign. However, eugenics represented a broad movement and leading figures
ran the gamut politically. Lewis Meriwether Dabney and Edward Everett Davis
could be fairly called conservative, or even reactionary. Huxley’s political ideology is harder to
define.

“He was no socialist, as he made explicit in If I Were A Dictator, [an essay]published in 1934 as a manifesto for
the planned society,” wrote author Colin Divall.[lxxiii]As noted above, Huxley saw democracy as
getting in the way of the eugenics agenda and his blunt elitism is hard to
reconcile with most definitions of socialism.His political writings, however, emphasized the importance of central
planning, an impulse typically associated with the left.He also described capitalism as dysgenic,
rewarding traits counterproductive to group survival such as “egoism, low
cunning, insensitiveness, and ruthless concentration.”He thought that the competitiveness and
ambition rewarded in capitalism also lead to one of the most dysgenic human
endeavors, war. “The only environment that had the potential of being truly
eugenic [in Huxley’s estimation] was one that was equalized, economically and
socially, for all members of society,” as Garland E. Allen summarized Huxley’s
political views. “Until such a political environment is created, the long-range
effects of eugenics will never be realized.So, to Huxley, as to his more radical associates, the eugenicist can no
longer avoid being both a eugenicist and a social reformer.In Huxley’s view, the one without the other
does not make sense.”[lxxiv]

Other Texas eugenicists could more clearly
be considered, in today’s terms, as belonging to the political gamut running
from “liberal” to the left.These
eugenicists ran headlong into the state’s ruling rock-ribbed conservative, or
even reactionary, political class.[lxxv]Carrie Weaver Smith at the Gainesville
Training School for Girls faced repeated challenges to her tenure from the state
Legislature, which repeatedly tried to pull funding for the institution over
issues ranging from how much tax revenue the school spent per inmate to her refusal
to build a fence around it to prevent the resident girls from running
away.Smith worried that the fence would
limit her girls’ ability to explore the grounds around the campus and create
the prison-like atmosphere she was trying to avoid. “The protests against the
wall became State-wide and the girls won because the Texas people realize the
importance of the spirit that giveth life rather than the restraint that
killeth,” Smith declared triumphantly after the Legislature dropped its efforts
to get a fence installed but also after she had lost her job. In spite of
widespread support from women’s groups in the state, such as the Dallas Women’s
Political League, Smith’s promotion of sex education, her ban on corporal
punishment and criticism of it at other institutions, and her suggestions that
institutions like hers needed more, not less, financial support, clearly
irritated her superiors in the state bureaucracy and the Texas House and
Senate. By July 1925, Smith’s run as the Gainesville school’s superintendent
had ended.“There is dissatisfaction
over the conduct of the school and I for one believe that the cost per girl
placed there is too high,” R.B. Walthall, a member of the state Control Board,
said before the board voted unanimously to dismiss her. Her dismissal didn’t
silence Smith, who continued to protest class biases in the state’s juvenile
justice system. “When a poor girl gets into a scandal or is charged with a
minor crime, she goes to court,” Smith said in a Chicago speech on December 14,
1925, five months after Texas sacked her.“When a wealthy girl gets into a similar difficulty she is bundled off
to finishing school until the scandal blows over.”[lxxvi]

Smith, the progressive eugenicist, left
Texas to run the Maryland State School for Girls before moving on to
Washington, D.C. to administer the National Training School for Girls.Her unconventional approach to juvenile
corrections again got her in trouble.She reportedly appalled First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt when she brought
inmates with her to a White House tea.When a fight broke out between white and black girls at the National
School, the D.C. Board of Commissioners dismissed her for being “too lenient.”[lxxvii]

Hermann Joseph Muller, a zoology professor
in Texas from the World War I era to the 1930s, became a prominent eugenicist and
one mentored by Huxley at Rice.He found
himself in the uncomfortable position of being a communist-leaning public
figure in an archconservative state. A
native New Yorker whose ancestors fled modern-day Germany for the United States
during the European revolutions of 1848, Muller grew up in a leftist home,
attending Columbia University in New York City, and eventually obtaining a
doctorate from Columbia’s zoology department.The degree was awarded while he was already teaching biology at the Rice
Institute.A friend, Edgar Altenburg,
later observed that while attending Columbia, Muller “traded in the three R’s
for the three S’s – science, sex, and socialism.”Muller described the evolution of his
political (and religious) thought in an autobiographical note written at the
home of a Russian friend, Nikolai Vavilov, when he was living in the Soviet
Union in 1937:

In 1906 I began
a lasting friendship with Edgar Altenburg, then a classmate.He came of a poor, working class
German-American family, who were dedicated adherents of the communist (then
called the “socialist”) movement and of Marxian thought in general.He and I argued out vehemently and to the
bitter end all questions of principle on which we differed, & thus he
succeeded in converting me both to atheism (I had been an enthusiastic
pantheist, arriving at this through Unitarianism) and to the cause of social
revolution, or communism.In college we
joined the “Intercollegiate Socialist Society,” later were against the war, and
for the Bolsheviks, and finally, when Communists and Socialists split from one
another, we were unqualifiedly for the former.Both of us, from 1907 to 1911, got some valuable practical contact with
the life of the working masses, during three or four months of each summer,
when we had to earn money at very low-paid jobs -- I as a bank messenger (at twenty-five
dollars per month), as a waiter, and as a hotel clerk (the later job requiring
14 hours on duty per day.)[lxxviii]

As the historian Daniel J. Kevles put it,
“Muller’s was an armchair socialism, drawn little from reading in its
doctrines, imbibed mainly from his father and his own circle of friends in New
York.Nevertheless, he advanced the
socialist cause with a bantam outspokenness.”[lxxix]Muller brought his politics with him when he
moved to Houston. Working with Huxley, he would teach as an instructor in the
still-new biology department at Rice from 1916-1918, returning to Columbia for
a couple of years, before serving as a zoology professor at the University of
Texas in Austin, from 1920 to 1936.While at Rice, he not only finished his doctorate, but also co-authored
a groundbreaking work on genetics, The
Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity (1915) and started the research that showed
radiation from X-rays produced mutations in fruit flies, research that would
eventually win Muller a Nobel Prize in the physiology or medicine category in
1946.[lxxx]

In 1921, Muller moved beyond fruit fly
genetics to that of humans, he said, when he studied the different way a set of
separated female twins had developed in Wyoming.Examination of the lives of other separated
twins led Muller to conclude, “that both heredity and environment play very
important roles in determining mental traits.”[lxxxi]
Muller, however, became convinced that through scientific genetic planning,
combined with the elimination of poverty, malnutrition and other ills
engendered by capitalism, “the positive biological improvement of mankind”
could be achieved “provided the
social reconstruction occurs first.” In 1925, while at the University of Texas,
Muller penned the pro-eugenics clarion call, Out of the Night: A Biologist’s View of the Future, but Muller
apparently hid the manuscript from public view for fear it would jeopardize his
academic career.In the book, he praised
the “great and solid actualities of collective achievement which are
increasingly evident in that one section of the world – the Soviet Union.”[lxxxii]Unlike his mentor Huxley, Muller was not
a racist and rejected the idea that poverty was a sign of dysgenic
biology.

“[I]t may be admitted that ‘Eugenics’, in
the sense in which most of us are now accustomed to thinking of it, has become
a hopelessly perverted movement,” he wrote in Out of the Night.“Beyond
imposing some slight limitation on the numbers of the most grossly defective,
it would be, with its present methods and outlook, powerless to work any
positive change for the good. On the other hand, it does incalculable harm by
lending a false appearance of scientific basis to advocates of race and class
prejudice, defenders of vested interests of church and state, Fascists,
Hitlerites, and other reactionaries generally.” Muller, angry that capitalist eugenicists
targeted the poor, immigrants, and people of color for sterilization, hoped
that the Soviet Union, with its stated commitment to class consciousness and to
human equality, would focus instead on using eugenics to eliminate disabilities
like genetically-related paralysis, blindness, and mental defects. With its
top-down authority structure and central planning, Muller believed the Soviet
system was the best designed to implement the “real biological upbuilding of humanity.”[lxxxiii]

His life took a downward spiral in the
early 1930s starting with his rejection for election to the National Academy of
Science in 1932.He also discovered that
his wife Jessie, a former math instructor at UT, was having an affair with a
mutual friend, Carlos Offerman (who worked at Muller’s university lab).Although Muller had agreed with Jessie to
have a so-called “open marriage,” the scientist felt betrayed by his wife.He disappeared for a time into woods near
Austin and a search party involving 100 students, faculty, and police went
looking for him.Muller had gobbled
barbiturates in a suicide attempt, searchers finding him disoriented as he sat
under a tree, an incident heavily covered by the Austin press. Even with his
personal stresses, Muller continued to fight for unpopular political causes, anonymously
editing and writing for a radical underground newspaper, The Spark (named after a newspaper edited by Vladimir Lenin while
the leader of the Russian Revolution was in exile in Switzerland).His
students distributed The Spark at the
UT campus and, through a network of friends, at Rice. Muller became controversial
not only in Texas, but even within the eugenics movement, delivering a scathing
paper, “The Dominance of Economics Over Eugenics,” at the Third International Eugenics
Conference in New York.In this lecture,
he castigated the American eugenics movement for ignoring how the injustices of
American capitalism produced much of the inequality conservative eugenicists attributed
solely to genes.Charles Davenport, the
founder of the Eugenics Records Office and organizer of the meeting, threatened
to cut the time allotted for Muller’s talk from an hour to just 15 minutes, but
Muller prevailed and was given his full time.He not only excoriated his fellow eugenicists, he also publically
proclaimed, for the first time, his sympathy for communism.According to science writer James Schwartz,
Muller told the unsympathetic audience that, “In order to justify economic
inequality . . .the dominant classes
claimed that it was their genetic superiority that accounted for their success
. . . but the very opposite was more likely to be true.”Like his mentor Huxley, Muller said that in
capitalism elites rise to the top due to “predatory rather than constructive
behavior” and the upper classes were, therefore, “repositories of the least
desirable traits.” As he put it in Out of
the Night, Muller feared that eugenics in America would promote breeding
among the most superficially attractive, violent, aggressive, and greedy and
produce, and (rattling off a rogue’s gallery of movie stars, evangelists,
sports heroes, and gangsters), a race of “Billy Sundays, [Rudolph] Valentinos,
Jack Dempseys, Babe Ruths, even Al Capones.”[lxxxiv]

His political radicalism caused him
trouble with the UT administration.Eager
to get out of Texas, in 1933 Muller took a leave of absence and had accepted a
Guggenheim Fellowship working at the Institut für
Hirnforschung in Berlin.While he was
on leave in Germany, the University of Texas fired Jessie’s lover Offerman for
his involvement with communist groups and with Muller’s newspaper The Spark.In spite of the affair with his estranged
wife, Muller hired Offerman to work with him in Berlin.[lxxxv]In Germany, Muller continued his work on how
radiation affected genes until his radical politics got him in trouble again,
and he was arrested and briefly detained by the communist-hunting German secret
police the Gestapo.[lxxxvi]

Muller had already struck up a friendship
with Soviet scientist N.I. Vavilov, who wanted to increase the stature of
Soviet science and tirelessly recruited the pioneer geneticist, who accepted a
post at the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences of the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics, first at Leningrad (1933-1934), and then at Moscow
(1934-1937).His professional adventures
in Texas had not ended yet, however.Muller
finally got his pro-eugenics book, Out of
the Night, published in the United States, and he asked his lifelong friend
Altenberg (then living in Houston) for help in getting the book distributed in
the state.“If it’s not too much trouble
for you . . .or some other sympathizer
(best of all a student in whom you can confide), it might be well to suggest to
the more progressive bookstores in Houston (especially near the institute
catering to students and faculty) that it might be worthwhile for them to get
and display my book [Out of the Night],”
Muller wrote hopefully to his friend.Meanwhile, Offerman followed Muller to the Soviet Union and the two men
continued their unconventional professional collaboration. Jessie filed for
divorce in Austin, married Offerman, and fearful that Muller would try to gain custody
of their son David from a friendly Soviet court when the child travelled with
his father in Russia in the summer of 1936, fought to win exclusive custody herself.Muller had to return to Texas, rendering the child
custody battle between a communist professor at the University of Texas and his
similarly radical wife a front-page spectacle in the Austin American newspaper.[lxxxvii]

Muller and Huxley’s sympathies with
at least some aspects of socialism and communism, and even Smith’s sometimes
ahead-of-its-time progressivism, ran counter to Texas’ rightwing political
culture and blunted the effectiveness of the eugenics movement in the state. As
Texas historian Randolph Campbell has noted, although the post-World War I,
post-Russian Revolution “Red Scare” that gripped the country from 1919-1920
“did not hit Texas particularly hard” because of the relative weaknesses of the
union movement in the state, “[a]nti-radicalism had an underlying appeal that
never disappeared.”Fundamentalist
Baptists such as J.B. Cranfill, editor of the influential Baptist Standard newspaper, no doubt aware of the biracial nature
of the state’s Populist revolt in the 1890s, warned of the dangers leftist
radicals posed to a God-ordained color line.Ministers from Southern Baptist, Disciples of Christ, and other
conservative Protestant denominations sought patronage from wealthy businessmen
and saw the political left as an enemy.Such preachers hailed the “dysgenic” capitalism that Huxley condemned,
the cutthroat materialism that Muller thought endangered the species, and the
unequal legal protections for the poor Smith disdained.Another Texas historian, Kyle Wilkison, notes
how one Disciples of Christ minister declared that, “the most beautiful souls”
he had encountered “were not among the poor, but the rich.”[lxxxviii]

Religion
blunted the growth in eugenics in Texas also because the eugenicists were, by
definition, Darwinists who rejected the Biblical account of creation in the
Book of Genesis and who therefore “undermined morality.” In 1916, S.M Provence
wrote an angry letter to the Houston
Chronicle after attending a one-hour lecture by Julian Huxley at Riceon “Biology and Religion.”Provence said Huxley claimed that religion
could aid human progress “providing that men will give up whatever religion
they have and accept the Darwinian theory of evolution.”Provence believed the Darwinism embraced by
Huxley presaged a savage future in which, “the weak are without friends, a
triumph that would make might the standard of right, reduce love to the passion
of the brute, paralyze altruism, destroy at once ‘faith, hope, and charity,’
demand the apotheosis of the ‘superman’ and throw the whole superstructure of
civilization into the melting pot to come out (if it should ever come out)
without form or substance.” Provence’s comments may have been off-the-mark
regarding Darwinism in general, but certainly did apply to the thrust of
eugenics as practiced in the twentieth century.[lxxxix]

Many Texans shared Provence’s concerns
about Darwinism. In March 1923, the state House debated a proposed law, the Stroder-Howeth
Bill, that would have banned the teaching of evolution in any tax-supported
school.The bill would have also
prohibited the use of any textbook that presented evolution as fact.The bill’s co-sponsor, Navarro County’s J.T.
Stroder, condemned Darwinism as a ‘vicious and infamous doctrine . . . that
mankind sprang from pollywog, to a frog, to an ape, to a monkey, to a baboon,
to a Jap, to a negro, to a Chinaman, to a man.”A supporter of the bill, J.A. Dodd from Bowie County, complained that
the state “forces me to pay taxes to support schools, and then forces me to
send my children to these schools and there shows my children the road to hell teaching
them the hellish infidelity of evolution.We owe it to our children and to our mothers who loved their Bibles and
taught us its meaning to abolish forever from our schools this insidious
fallacy which holds that the Bible is a liar and man is a monkey.” The bill
passed the House 71-34.[xc]

It hit a roadblock in the state Senate.
Opponents of the bill successfully argued that an anti-evolution law endangered
academic freedom and that such a bill exceeded the authority of the state
legislature.The Senate Committee on
Education reported favorably on the bill, but it ultimately failed.Some senators offered the most likely reason
the anti-evolution measure never became law: it was unnecessary because most
Texas teachers, who either didn’t know about Darwin or rejected his theories,
didn’t teach evolution anyway. The state
Legislature debated anti-evolution bills in public schools in every session
from 1923 until 1929, although in each case the efforts failed.[xci]

One Church of Christ evangelist with a
wide audience in the early 20th century, William E. Lemmons,
identified Charles Darwin and Karl Marx as two of the chief agents of the devil
in the modern world.[xcii]
In Texas, Lemmons represented the consensus. As committed Darwinists,
eugenicists like Muller, who “fought vigorously against the anti-evolution
movement in the United States, circulating petitions among his colleagues to
save Texas from enacting an anti-evolution law in the legislature,” would thus find
themselves outliers in the state.[xciii]

Politically,
it didn’t boost the eugenicists’ cause that one of the state’s most prominent
eugenicists, Muller, was an atheist, or that Huxley publicly rejected the idea
of the Bible as divinely revealed and the concept of an anthropomorphic God. The ideas that Provence found so
objectionable during that lecture at the Rice Institute were no doubt those
Huxley put into print years later in his book Religion Without Revelation: “It seems to me quite clear that the
idea of personality in God or in any supernatural being or beings has been put
there by man, put into and around a perfectly real conception which we might
continue to call God if the word had not been acquired by long association with
the implication of a personal being; and therefore I disbelieve in a personal
God in any sense in which that phrase is ordinarily used.”[xciv]

The identification of some important
eugenicists with both political leftism and rejection of
Christianity, therefore, alienated potential allies in Texas. Texas evangelicals and fundamentalists did
share a fear of what Lathrop Stoddard called in his best seller, “the rising
tide of color.” An article in a 1923 edition of the Dallas-based newspaper The Baptist Standard sounded the alarm
over the supposed decline in the white Protestant human stock in the American
Southwest:

Here,
in the Southland, is at least a third of the population of the whole
nation.The largest percentage of
Anglo-Saxons is here.But we have also
some 100,000 Indians, 1,000,000 Mexicans, 3,000,000 European foreigners, and
9,000,000, Negroes . . . In the South is found the home of Protestantism . . .
But the Southland is not fully Christianized. It is not all even evangelized .
. . Our religious problems are stupendous . . . We have here cities, some of
whose vileness, beastliness, criminality, God-defying blasphemousness and utter
hellishness puts to shame Calcutta and Constantinople. We have these pitiful
backwards peoples, the Indians, Mexicans, and Negroes.We have these millions of difficult alien
people who have brought to our shores their unknown gods and rites and their
tiger-like passions . . . [xcv]

In a positive review of a book called If America Fail: Our National Mission
and Our Possible Future (1922) by Samuel Zane Batten, the Standard noted
without criticism Batten’s claim that, “If the present tendencies
continue for five generations, the Anglo-Saxon blood will have passed and other
bloods will be dominant.The Americans
of three generations hence, if present tendencies continue, will be less
patriotic, more Catholic; less democratic, more favorable to autocracy.No Latin or Slavic race has ever been Protestant
or democratic.”[xcvi]
Nevertheless, even if evangelicals and fundamentalists in Texas could have
looked past the eugenicists’ Darwinism and atheism and made common cause
against the supposed Eastern European and Southern European onslaught and
encouraged white Protestant breeding, many Protestants in Texas had been
gripped by a powerful theological trend, “pre-millennial dispensationalism,”that discouraged political activism. Promoted
in the early twentieth century by Dallas minister Cyrus Scofield, dispensationalists
believed that the Bible represented a prophetic text that predicted the
imminent “Second Coming” of Jesus.Intensely anti-Catholic because they believed that the Vatican
represented a Satanic false Christianity, such Protestants might have been
expected to represent a force for eugenics legislation aimed at controlling the
population of Catholic Mexicans, Italians and other aliens in Texas. Dispensationalism, however, discouraged
political activism, believing that faith in human institutions like
legislatures represented a rejection of God as the ultimate arbiter of human
affairs. "The true mission of the church is not the reformation of
society," Scofield declared."What Christ did not do, the Apostles did not do.Not one of them was a reformer.”This growing apolitical religious movement
denied eugenicists a potentially key group of supporters.[xcvii]

The eugenics movement was also weakened by
the outsider status of many of the most important spokespersons of the
cause.Huxley came from England and left
in three years. Smith emigrated from Georgia and stayed in Texas longer than
Huxley, nine years, but was probably marginalized by her status as a woman in a
misogynist age. Muller arrived from New York and held professorship at Rice
from 1915 to 1918 and the University of Texas until 1936, but was on a leave of
absence for the last three years at UT and his Austin years were marked by a
highly publicized suicide attempt and divorce, which, along with his political
ideology, probably hampered his effectiveness as a lobbyist for eugenics in
Austin.At the same time, a native-born
Texan with substantial political pull, Sen. Arthur Duggan, died before he could
realize his goal of passing a sterilization bill.

Of course, some of the factors
affecting the success of the eugenics movement in Texas were also present in
states that did pass sterilization laws.Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and
Virginia certainly held large numbers of evangelicals and fundamentalists who
would have been offended by the Darwinism and atheism of the eugenics movement
and dominant conservatives in that state might have been put off by the
left-leaning radicalism of some famous eugenicists such as birth control
advocate Margaret Sanger.[xcviii]However, those states were not yet importing
large numbers of Mexican immigrants to work as agricultural workers, an
enterprise at cross purposes with the generally shared goal of eugenicists to
limit entry into the United States to those from Northern and Western Europe.

Eugenicists wanted to not just sterilize
the unfit, but also shut down emigration into the United States by so-called
undesirables.Opposition to eugenics
laws in Texas was greatly strengthened by the influence of cotton growers in
the state who in the early twentieth century began importing Mexican farm
workers in large numbers. Texas’ urban population grew steadily in the early
twentieth century, but by the 1920s Texas was still an overwhelmingly rural
state, meaning that big growers in rural Texas House districts had
disproportionate influence over the state legislature.[xcix]

Cotton growers worried that eugenics
legislation nationally and at the state level might make it harder to find cheap
labor to compete with white and black farm labor.After passage of the nativist 1917
Immigration Act, Texas planters and growers successfully lobbied Secretary of
Labor William B. Wilson to allow the temporary entry of “otherwise inadmissible
aliens” to offset labor shortages created by the American entry into World War
I.Eugenicists led a chorus of protest
against the quota waivers, leading Wilson after the war to rescind his
exemptions of Mexican workers.Once
again, the big planters and growers insisted they needed the cheap labor of
Mexicans (whom they argued were uniquely suited physically for farm labor), and
the exemptions were extended until 1920.When the U.S Congress passed a new Quota Act in 1921 further restricting
the immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans, Mexican farm labor became
even more important in Texas, and again the rich landowners got all the poorly
paid migrant workers they wanted.[c]
Cotton growers, as the historian Neil Foley observed, had become so dependent
on scantily-paid Mexican farm labor that they feared that immigration
restriction would cause them economic disaster.Nevertheless, many Anglos worried about the alleged genetic inferiority
of Mexicans as well as their possible radical politics.[ci]One
opponent to the use of Mexican labor in Texas declared, “To Mexicanize Texas or
to Orientalize California is a crime.”[cii]

In
1923, the Texas House debated a concurrent resolution introduced by Dallas Rep.
Lewis Carpenter requesting the United States Congress to allow the governor of
a state or the state Legislature to draw up a quota “of the kind and character
and number of immigrants which any given State is willing and ready to receive
for any given year or period of years.”The quota would then be forwarded to federal immigration authorities in
Washington, and the national quota of immigrants from a nation like Mexico
could be raised to that number to meet a state’s economic needs.As a sop to the nativists and eugenicists,
Carpenter and his allies included a provision requiring immigrants to remain in
the custody of the state until they returned home or became United States
citizens.Such a requirement would
guarantee the “preservation of a homogeneous race” in Texas and the rest of the
country, Carpenter argued.Such
arguments didn’t calm lawmakers fearing a rising tide of color washing
northward from the Texas border. House Concurrent Resolution 15 was referred to
the Committee on Federal Relations, which ultimately rejected the proposal.[ciii]Nevertheless, in 1924 when the Congress
passed the most restrictive immigration legislation in American history, the
Johnson-Reed Act, the law focused on shutting down what had been since the
1880s massive Southern and Eastern European immigration while planters in Texas
and elsewhere could still import low-wage Mexican farm workers, even as men
like Congressman Box throughout the decade continued to warn of “problems from
the racial standpoint” of such immigration.[civ]

During the 1930s, Virginia targeted poor
whites with eugenics legislation, in one case rounding up children deemed
“feebleminded” in the Brush Mountain region and shipping them to institutions
like Western State Hospital, a former mental institution, and subjecting them
to involuntary vasectomies and tubal ligations without their knowledge or
consent.[cv]No such scenes played out in Texas. The
eugenics movement in Texas had a long life, predating its rise in most of the
country.The movement in Texas had flamboyant
and enthusiastic spokesmen.It recruited
a large number of adherents, and believers held important offices at the state
and local levels.Eugenicist warnings of
a looming biological apocalypse gripped the meetings of parent-teacher
organizations while the promise of planned breeding was celebrated at state
fairs.Eugenics was studied in
universities and in public schools, and advocated by the state’s political left
and right.Yet, due to conflicts over
Darwinism and atheism, the unconventional and perceived radical politics of
some of the loudest Texas eugenics advocates, and the desire of cotton planters
in Texas for an exploited, underpaid workforce from Mexico, meant that Texans
were never subjected in large numbers to Gideon Lincecum’s “purifying knife.”

“The Current is Stronger’: Images of Racial Oppression and Resistance in North Texas Black Art During the 1920s and 1930s ” in Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011)

“Dallas, 1989-2011,” in Richardson Dilworth, ed. Cities in American Political History (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011)

(With John Anthony Moretta and Keith J. Volanto), Keith J. Volonto and Michael Phillips, eds., The American Challenge: A New History of the United States, Volume II. (Wheaton, Il.: Abigail Press, 2012).

“Texan by Color: The Racialization of the Lone Star State,” in David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison, eds., The Radical Origins of the Texas Right (College Station: University of Texas Press, 2013).

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of African American culture, politics and black intellectuals in the Lone Star State called God Carved in Night: Black Intellectuals in Texas and the World They Made.

[iv]Journal of the House of Representatives
of the Regular Session of the Thirty Eighth Legislature Begun and Held at the
City of Austin, January 9, 1923 (Austin: Von Boeckmann-Jones Co., 1923), p.
47-48, 311.

[ix]
The speech in included in Lewis Meriwether Dabney, A Memoir and Letters (New York: privately printed by J.J. Little
and Ives Company, 1924), 214.

[x]
There were 48 states at the time.States
that never enacted compulsory sterilization laws were Arkansas, Colorado,
Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New
Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Wyoming. See Lutz Kaelber, “Eugenics: Compulsory
Sterilization in 50 American States,” http://www.uvm.edu/%7Elkaelber/eugenics/.
Accessed December 27, 2015.For the
number of sterilization victims, see Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a
Master Race (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003), 398.

[xi]
In addition to Black and Carlson’s works, major scholarly explorations of
eugenics include Elazar Barkan, The
Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the
United States Between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992); Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell, eds., Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in
1930s (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 1981; Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1985); Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics From The Turn
of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001); Marek Kohn, The Race Gallery: The
Return of Racial Science (London: Vintage, 1995);Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Paul A. Lombardo, ed., A Century of Eugenics in America: From the
Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 2011); Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001); James Schwartz, In Pursuit of the Gene: From Darwin to DNA (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2008); Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of
Madison Grant (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2009); and William
H. Tucker, The Funding of Scientific
Racism: Wycliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2002).Neil Foley explores Texas eugenics in The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton
Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), as doesRamona Hopkins in “Was There a
‘Southern’ Eugenics; a Comparative Case Study of Eugenics in Texas and
Virginia, 1900-1940” (master’s thesis, University of Houston, 2009).

[xxxvi]
“Upper House.”In Buck v. Bell, the court upheld the constitutionality of a Virginia
coerced sterilization law, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., defending
the statute in the majority opinion he authored by referencing the family of
Carrie Buck a woman contesting an order that she undergo a tubal ligation,
infamously declared, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” See Black,
War Against the Weak, 116-122.

[lxii]
Important works on the Great Migration include James M. Gregory, The
Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners
Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2005); Carol Marks, Farewell—We’re Good and
Gone: The Great Migration (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); and
Alferdteen Harrison, Black Exodus: The
Great Migration from the American South (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1991).

[lxv]
Ibid. Throughout his career, Huxley produced a prodigious volume of essays and
books aimed at both a popular and a narrower scholarly audience and which
revealed an evolving understanding of race.By the 1930s, as his opposition to the Nazi regime in Germany deepened,
he argued that race was not a valid biological concept and that it was,
essentially, socially constructed.Nevertheless, he retained an inaccurate, and exceedingly condescending,
understanding of African culture, suggesting in one article in the Fortnightly Weekly that “The inhabitants
of tropical Africa ranges from Hottentot an Pigmy to Negro, Bantu, and Hamite;
but in spite of their great diversity (far greater than is to be encountered in
all Europe from Stockholm to Constantinople, from Leningrad to Lisbon), they
have never achieved more than the rudiments of civilization.In tropical Africa, the plough is unknown,
and agriculture must make shift with hoe or digging stick.The principle of the wheel was never known
there. The art of building in stone was never leant (save in a restricted
region of time and space, near Zimbabwe).And writing too, remained undiscovered.”See Julian S. Huxley, “Why is the White Man in Africa?” Fortnightly Review (January 1932), p.
6.Important works by Huxley on race
include The Stream of Life (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1926); We Europeans:
A Survey of ‘Racial’ Problems (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935); “The
Concept of Race in Light of Modern Genetics,” Harpers Monthly Magazine 170
(May 1935); (with A.C. Haddon), “Scientific Pitfalls of Racialism,” Yale Review Vol. XXIV, No. 6 (June
1935); “Racial Myths and Ethnic Fallacies,” Discovery
XVI (September 1935);

[lxxv]
Three essential works on the hegemony of conservative ideology in Texas are
Chandler Davidson, Race and Class in
Texas Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); George
Green, The Establishment in Texas
Politics: The Primitive Years, 1938-1957 (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1979); and David O’Donald Cullen and Kyle Wilkison, eds., The Texas Right: The Radical Roots of Lone
Star Conservatism (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014).

[lxxxvii]
Letter, Herman Joseph Muller to Edgar Altenburg, Moscow, Institute of Genetics,
Academy of Sciences,December 15, 1935,
Hermann J. Muller Collection, Series II, Biographical Materials, Memorabilia,
1912-1972, Box 1, Correspondence Folder 1.3; “Autobiographical Notes”;
Schwartz, 254-257; “Mullers Dispute Over Son’s Custody,” Austin American, June 9, 1936, p. 1; “Muller Boy Must Stay in Texas
Wherever Parents Go, Judge Orders,” Austin
American, June 11, 1936, p. 1.Muller’s cinematic life continued in the Soviet Union.A serious and accomplished geneticist, Muller
made enemies with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s pet scientist, an unqualified
political hack, Trofim Lysenko, who became head of the Institute of
Genetics.Made exaggerated claims that
he had successfully made wheat crops resistant to Russian freezes by treating wheat
seeds with moisture and cold, an alleged durability he falsely claimed could be
inherited by a crop’s offspring.Muller
scathingly refuted Lysenko, but was forced by Soviet officials to issue an
apology.Appalled by the Stalin
dictatorship’s suffocation of free scientific inquiry, and the perversion of
science there to meet propaganda ends, Muller realized he might be in danger
amid the great Soviet purges of the 1930s.This fear grew when Stalin read a Russian translation of Out of the Night, the communist party
chairman greatly disliked. Muller knew he would soon be denounced in the Soviet
press, an event often the prelude to an execution. He travelled to Spain for a
time to support the Republican cause in the civil war against the fascists led
by Francisco Franco, making his final escape from “the closing jaws of
Stalinism” in 1938. He made it back to the United States in 1940 and , though
he had trouble finding work because of his Soviet sojourn,he eventually landed a tenured professorship,
with the help of Huxley, at the University of Indiana in Bloomington.At the end of his life, he lent his support
to the Institute of Germinal Choice, later labeled in the press as the “Nobel
Sperm Bank,” in Escondido, California.Established by eccentric eugenicist millionaire Robert Klark Graham, the
institute sought to fertilize intellectually gifted women with the sperm of
Nobel Prize winners.Graham’s efforts
failed, in part, because the few Nobel winners who contributed semen to the
Institute were at an age where they suffered decreased sperm motility, greatly
reducing their fertility.See, Schwartz,
257-276; David Joravsky, The Lysenko
Affair (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 72, 103, 117,
235, 264, 317; Plotz, The Genius Factory.

[lxxxviii]
Randolph Campbell, Gone To Texas: A
History of the Lone Star State (Oxford University Press, 2003), 366; Kyle
Wilkison, “The Evils of Socialism: The Religious Right in Early
Twentieth-Century Texas,” in Cullen and Wilkison, The Texas Right, 39-40.

[xcvii]
Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More;
Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1992),
298.

[xcviii]
For perceptions of Sanger and her relationship to eugenics, see Black, War Against the Weak, 125-144.For an excellent biography of Sanger, see Ellen Chesler, A Woman of Valor: Margaret
Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1992).

[ciii]Journal of the House of Representatives
of the Regular Session of the Thirty Eighth Legislature Begun and Held at the
City of Austin, January 9, 1923 (Austin: Von Boeckmann-Jones Co., 1923),
587-588, 614, 643.

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About Me

I received my Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin. My first book, "White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001," won the Texas State Historical Commission's T.R. Fehrenbach Award for best work on Texas history in 2007. My second book, "The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics" will be published by the University of Texas Press March 1, 2010.
My beautiful boy Dominic was born on May 30, 2003. He's an avid reader and loves Harry Potter and Star Wars.
I am a frustrated political liberal, holding Democrats in contempt but too suspicious about the competence of the Green Party to make the leap.
I am married to a wonderful woman named Betsy Friauf who was my editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram 20 years ago. We will be writing books together.
My only appointment television is "The Daily Show," "The Colbert Report" and "Countdown with Keith Olbermann." I also love to cook when I have the time.